October 12th, 2023.8:47 p.m.

The Harborview estate in Boston’s most exclusive neighborhood.

Crystal chandeliers cast warm light across a living room filled with Boston’s medical elite.

Their laughter mixing with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons performed by a live string quartet.

Champagne flowed from bottles worth $340 each.

Catered appetizers from Harrison and Wells disappeared from silver trays as quickly as white glove servers could replenish them.

This was wealth.

This was success.

This was the kind of party where futures were made and reputations cemented.

In the center of it all stood Dr.Nathaniel Cross, 51 years old, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Riverside Memorial Hospital, accepting birthday congratulations with the easy charm of a man who’d never doubted his place in the world.

His salt and pepper hair was perfectly styled.

His Tom Ford suit fit like it had been painted onto his athletic frame.

The Patec Philippe watch on his wrist cost $84,000.

A gift from his wife for their 15th wedding anniversary.

He looked like exactly what he was, a man at the pinnacle of American success.

But across the crowded room near the Italian marble fireplace, six women stood in an unintentional circle, champagne glasses trembling in their hands.

six Filipino nurses who worked at Riverside Memorial.

Six women who had each believed with absolute certainty that they were the only one.

The recognition dawned simultaneously, spreading across their faces like ice water through veins.

Lega Marcato spoke first, her voice flat with bitter understanding.

Oh my god, he’s sleeping with all of us, isn’t he? The party continued around them, oblivious.

But for those six women, the world had just ended.

To understand how six intelligent, capable women ended up in this moment, we need to go back 18 months back to when Dr.

Nathaniel Cross perfected a system so meticulous, so psychologically sophisticated that it would operate without a single crack for nearly 3 years.

Nathaniel Cross wasn’t born a monster.

He was created by a system that rewarded men like him and punished those who dared to question them.

Born in 1972 to a surgeon father and a socialite mother in Greenwich, Connecticut, Nathaniel learned early that the world was divided into those who took and those who gave.

His father had taught him that power wasn’t just about money or position.

It was about control.

The most valuable thing you can own, his father had told him over scotch in their mahogany panled study is another person’s dependency.

Nathaniel took that lesson to heart.

By 2020, he had achieved everything society told him to want.

Chief of cardiotheric surgery at one of Boston’s premier hospitals, an annual salary of 847,000 before bonuses, 47 peer-reviewed publications in prestigious medical journals, a success rate of 98.

7% across 312 open heart surgeries.

He’d performed a double valve replacement on a senator’s wife.

He’d saved the son of a tech billionaire.

His hands, steady and precise, held life and death with equal ease.

His marriage to Victoria Ashford Cross was equally perfect on paper.

Victoria came from pharmaceutical money, old money that had compounded across four generations into a fortune estimated at $67 million.

Their Harborview estate, purchased in 2014 for $4.

7 million, featured eight bedrooms, a wine celler, and views of Boston Harbor that appeared in architectural magazines.

They attended the right charity gallas.

They vacationed in the right places.

They were by every external measure the perfect power couple.

But Victoria traveled constantly for her family’s business, 287 days in 2022 alone.

and Nathaniel, brilliant and bored, had discovered that the real thrill wasn’t in saving lives or publishing papers.

It was in the experiment, the game, the absolute control of another human being’s emotional reality.

He’d started small, a flirtation here, a meaningful conversation there.

But by January 2021, he’d refined his method into something approaching science.

He kept detailed journals, clinical observations written in the same precise handwriting he used for surgical notes.

The journals had titles, subject acquisition and maintenance, dependency creation through strategic reinforcement, comparative analysis of vulnerability exploitation.

He wasn’t just collecting women.

He was conducting research.

The hospital ecosystem provided the perfect hunting ground.

Riverside Memorial employed 847 beds, ranked third in the nation for cardiaotheric care.

The nursing staff included 34 nurses across six different shifts, and 19 of those nurses were Filipino immigrants.

Nathaniel understood the mathematics of vulnerability.

These women made between $67,000 and $84,000 annually.

He made 10 times that.

They worked on H1B visas that tied their legal status to employment.

He sat on the hiring committee.

They came from a culture that conditioned them toward respect for authority and medical hierarchy.

He was the chief of surgery, the man who decided which nurses assisted in life-saving procedures.

Power wasn’t just about money.

It was about a symmetry.

It was about creating a relationship where one person held all the cards and the other didn’t even know the game was rigged.

His system was elegant.

He colorcoded his personal calendar.

Blues for Tina, greens for Mari, purples for Sari.

Monday and Tuesday nights belonged to the night shift nurse who finished at 7:00 a.

m.

They’d have breakfast at his bachelor apartment in Cambridge, a one-bedroom he’d rented specifically for these encounters.

Wednesday and Thursday evenings were for the evening shift nurse.

Dinners at boutique hotels, never the same one twice, always paid in cash.

Friday afternoons when Victoria was traveling belonged to the dayshift nurse at his real home in Beacon Hill.

Saturday nights were for the weekend night nurse in her small apartment in Dorchester.

Sunday mornings meant brunch along the Charles River with the youngest.

The romantic strolls that cost nothing but meant everything to a woman who believed in destiny.

And floating through the gaps was the perdm nurse, the pragmatist who thought transactional honesty protected her.

six women, six different manipulation tactics, six perfectly calibrated relationships that never overlapped, never collided, never raised suspicion.

He spent exactly $6,300 per month maintaining all six relationships combined, gifts, dinners, the occasional loan that he never expected to be repaid.

It was barely more than his monthly car payment.

But to women making $70,000 a year while sending money home to families in the Philippines, $6,300 spread across six of them felt like generosity, felt like love.

What made Nathaniel’s manipulation brilliant wasn’t the money.

It was the precision with which he identified and exploited each woman’s specific psychological vulnerability.

For Tina, the intellectual, he created a partnership fantasy.

He discussed complex cases with her, asked her opinion on surgical approaches, made her believe she was his professional equal, trapped in a nurse’s role by circumstances and gender.

He fed her ego while starving her heart, creating a woman who stayed because leaving would mean admitting she’d been fooled.

For Mari, the romantic, he constructed an entire fairy tale.

Poetry copied from websites, handwritten notes that took him 3 minutes to compose, but she’d treasure for months.

The ring he gave her, purchased from a pawn shop for $47, he’d claimed belonged to his grandmother, that it was worth $12,000, that giving it to her meant more than any diamond.

She’d planned their entire wedding in her mind, down to the specific hymns and the color of the bridesmaid’s dresses.

For sorry, the widow still grieving a husband lost in a fairy accident.

Nathaniel positioned himself as the only person who truly understood loss.

He’d held her while she cried, then slowly replaced the ghost of her dead husband with himself.

It was psychological replacement therapy dressed as romance.

For Lisa, the single mother, he was salvation itself.

The $500 he sent monthly for her twins education.

A pittance compared to his salary, created a dependency so complete that she felt she owed him not just love, but her entire existence.

Her children called him Uncle Nate on FaceTime calls.

How could she leave a man who cared about her babies? For Ammy, the youngest at 26, he let her feel like the beautiful temptress who’d seduced a powerful older man.

He fed her youth back to her as power.

Made her believe she was in control, even as he controlled every aspect of their relationship.

And for Gaia, the cynical pragmatist, he played the only card that would work, honesty about the transaction.

We’re both adults using each other.

He told her, “I need discretion.

You need stability and a path to permanent residency.

Let’s help each other.

The paradox was perfect.

By admitting the relationship was transactional, he made her trust him.

But the darkest truth, the one that would later be discovered in his journals, was this.

Nathaniel wasn’t collecting women because he loved them or even desired them particularly.

He was conducting an experiment in control.

He’d specifically chosen Filipino nurses, immigrants, vulnerable, culturally conditioned toward difference to test his theories about manipulation.

He documented everything which compliments generated maximum emotional attachment, the optimal ratio of gifts to dependency, how much attention created obsession versus suspicion, how much sex strengthened bonds versus created expectations he couldn’t meet.

He treated them like lab rats, and he was very, very good at it.

For 36 months, the system operated flawlessly.

Not a single crack, not a single near miss, six women, six shifts, six separate lives that never touched until Victoria Cross decided to throw her husband a surprise birthday party.

Celestina Tina Abbya arrived in Boston on a frozen February morning in 2018, carrying two suitcases and dreams that felt heavier than her luggage.

At 34 years old, she was the eldest of seven siblings from Manila.

And from the moment her father’s fist first connected with her mother’s face when Tina was six, she’d made herself a promise.

She would never be powerless.

She would never depend on a man.

She would never be trapped.

Nursing school had been her escape route.

She’d worked three jobs to pay tuition, studying by streetlight when the electricity was shut off in their cramped apartment.

When she passed her licensing exam and secured a position at Riverside Memorial Hospital through a staffing agency, she’d wept with relief.

The salary of $73,000 seemed like lottery winnings compared to the $8,000 she’d made annually in Manila.

She sent $1,400 home every month without fail, keeping her mother and siblings housed and fed.

She’d promised herself she’d never depend on a man, but she’d never promised she wouldn’t fall for one.

Nathaniel Cross first spoke to her during a complex aortic valve replacement in March 2020.

She was assisting, handing instruments with the precision she’d honed over 12 years of nursing.

Mid-surgery, he’d paused, looked at her directly over his mask, and said, “You anticipated that.

You knew I’d need the smaller retractor before I asked.

That’s the mark of someone who thinks like a surgeon, not just a nurse.

” The compliment landed exactly where he’d intended.

Tina had spent her entire career being dismissed by doctors, treated as a pair of hands rather than a mind.

This man, this brilliant, respected surgeon, saw her intelligence, saw her potential, saw her, their first coffee was professional.

The second was personal.

By the third, he was telling her about his loveless marriage, how Victoria was barely home, how he felt more like a trophy husband than a partner.

“When I talk to you,” he’d said, holding her gaze across a Cambridge cafe table.

I feel like someone finally sees me.

Not the surgeon, not the name on research papers, just me.

She’d believed him.

For 3 years, she’d believed every word.

Mari Vic Mari Santos had grown up on romance novels and Filipino teliseries where love conquered everything.

At 29, she still believed in soulmates with the fervor of someone who’d never had her heart truly broken.

Her childhood in Quesan City had been stable, even loving.

But her mother’s disability from a stroke required constant care and expensive medication.

Mari sent $1,200 home monthly, living on the remainder with a careful budget that left no room for luxuries.

When Nathaniel gave her the ring in August 2021, slipping it onto her finger during a weekend trip to Cape Cod, she’d actually gasped.

The gold band with its modest diamond caught the sunlight streaming through their hotel window.

It was my grandmother’s, he told her, his voice heavy with emotion.

She gave it to me before she died and made me promise I’d only give it to someone I truly loved.

Mari had worn it on a chain around her neck during work shifts, touching it like a talisman.

She’d created Pinterest boards for their wedding, harbor chapel for the ceremony, a reception at the Fairmont, soft pink and gold for the color scheme.

She’d mentally written her vows a hundred times.

At night, she’d practiced signing her new name, Mari Vic Cross, Mrs.

Nathaniel Cross.

The ring had cost him $47 at a pawn shop in Dorchester.

To Mari, it was priceless.

Rosario Sari Lim knew what it meant to lose everything.

Her husband of 9 years, Miguel, had died in a ferry accident off Davo in 2019, and the grief had nearly killed her, too.

For months after his death, she couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t imagine a future that made any sense.

She’d come to Boston in 2020, specifically to escape the memories that haunted every street corner in her hometown.

At 37, she’d believed her chance at happiness had died with Miguel.

Then, Nathaniel appeared in her grief support group.

He’d claimed to be there processing the death of his marriage.

He understood loss, he said.

He knew what it meant to feel like half of yourself was missing.

Their relationship began with him holding her while she cried about Miguel.

Gradually over months, those crying sessions turned into conversations.

The conversations became dinners.

The dinners became nights she didn’t spend alone.

Nathaniel was patient, gentle, respectful of her grief.

He never asked her to forget Miguel.

He just slowly, carefully filled the space Miguel had left behind.

You’ll always love him, Nathaniel had told her one night, stroking her hair as she lay against his chest.

I’m not asking you to replace that.

I’m just asking you to let me give you a second chapter.

You deserve happiness.

Sorry.

Miguel would want that for you.

She’d believed he was her second chance.

Her proof that life could begin again after devastating loss.

She’d betrayed Miguel’s memory for a lie.

Dallas a Lisa Reyes left her six-year-old twins, Marco and Maria, at Manila’s airport with tears streaming down all four faces.

Her parents held the children as Lisa boarded her flight to Boston, promising it was only temporary, that she’d bring them over soon, that this sacrifice would give them the future they deserved.

That was February 2021.

The guilt of leaving her children consumed her.

She worked double shifts whenever possible, sent every spare dollar home.

dollar1 800 monthly for their school, clothes, food, and the guilt she couldn’t quite pay away.

She lived on instant noodles and rice, wore the same scrubs until they were threadbear, and hadn’t bought herself anything new in 2 years.

When Nathaniel started sending $500 monthly for the twins education, Lisa had wept with gratitude.

When he facetimed with Marco and Maria, making them laugh, asking about their schoolwork, she’d felt something crack open in her chest.

This man cared about her children.

This man was helping her be the mother she desperately wanted to be.

When my divorce is final, he’d promised her, “I’ll sponsor their visas.

We’ll bring them here, all of us together.

You won’t have to be apart from them anymore.

” She’d worked herself to exhaustion for that promise.

She’d given him everything, her body, her trust, her absolute loyalty, because he was going to reunite her with her babies.

The $500 he sent monthly was less than he spent on wine.

Amihan Ammy Cruz was 26 years old and had believed herself sophisticated, worldly, immune to the kind of manipulation that trapped other women.

She’d come to Boston in January 2022 as the first person in her family to leave Iloilo.

Determined to prove that she was more than her provincial background suggested.

When Nathaniel pursued her, she’d felt powerful.

She was young, beautiful, and she’d seduced a brilliant older man away from his boring life.

She posted carefully cropped photos on Instagram, expensive restaurants, hotel rooms with city views, designer handbags, cultivating 2,847 followers who envied her glamorous life.

“You make me feel alive,” Nathaniel had told her during their first weekend together.

“Everyone else sees the surgeon, the chief, the expert.

You see the man, you make me feel young again.

” Ammy had believed she was different from other women.

Special, the one who could actually change a powerful man’s life.

She was the temptress, the muse, the irresistible force.

She’d skipped meals to fit into smaller dresses.

She developed an obsession with her appearance that would eventually become a full eating disorder.

She transformed herself into what she thought he wanted, never realizing she was destroying herself for someone who saw her as subject number five.

Compliance level 9 out of 10.

Emotional vulnerability score 10 out of 10.

Lega Gaia Marcato had never believed in fairy tales.

At 33, she’d seen enough of life to know that everything was a transaction.

When Nathaniel approached her in November 2022, she’d been upfront.

I don’t do romance.

I don’t do pretending.

If we’re doing this, we both know what it is.

He’d smiled and she thought she saw respect in his eyes.

Finally, someone honest.

I need discretion.

You need stability.

and eventually a green card.

We help each other like adults.

No games.

She thought cynicism protected her.

She thought seeing the transaction clearly meant she couldn’t be used.

They met in on call rooms, parking garages, hotel rooms rented by the hour.

He paid her $1,200 monthly as a consulting fee.

He covered her immigration lawyer’s retainer of $4,500.

It was honest, she told herself.

Transactional, safe.

What she didn’t understand was that by making her think she was in control of the transaction, he’d controlled her completely.

The pragmatist who thought she couldn’t be fooled would end up the most destroyed of all.

Six women, six vulnerabilities, six expertly crafted relationships that fed on different hungers for intellectual validation, romantic love, grief counseling, maternal sacrifice, youthful power, and cynical honesty.

On October 12th, 2023, at 8:47 p.

m.

, those six separate realities collided in a living room in Beacon Hill, and every carefully constructed lie shattered simultaneously.

The birthday party invitation had seemed strange to each of them.

Why would Victoria invite them to the house? How did she even know their names? But they’d all come, driven by curiosity, hope, or in Gaia’s case, suspicion that something was finally going wrong.

Within 45 minutes of arriving, they found each other.

The recognition was instant.

The way they each watched Nathaniel, the same longing mixed with possessive pain, the identical wound behind different faces.

When Gaia spoke those words, he’s sleeping with all of us, isn’t he? The world stopped.

Tina’s voice came out strangled.

3 years.

I’ve been with him for 3 years.

Mari touched the ring hanging from the chain around her neck.

He gave me his grandmother’s ring.

He said, “I was the only one.

” Sorry, started crying silently, tears running mascara down her cheeks.

Lisa’s mind was calculating losses.

Two years, $12,000 he’d sent for her children.

The promises about visas and reunion.

Ammy looked like she might vomit.

Her carefully applied makeup suddenly garish under the chandelier light.

Gaia laughed, bitter and broken.

I thought I was the smart one.

I thought I couldn’t be fooled.

Across the room, Nathaniel Cross noticed them clustered together and felt cold dread settle in his chest.

He walked toward them, his mind already working through damage control scenarios.

But damage control was impossible.

The explosion was already happening.

The Harborview estate had been designed to impress.

And on this October evening, it succeeded spectacularly.

The party had cost Victoria exactly $34,000 to orchestrate.

Catering from Harrison and Wells, a string quartet from the New England Conservatory, flowers from Beacon Hill Florist arranged in crystal vases worth more than most people’s monthly rent.

87 guests circulated through rooms that smelled of expensive perfume, aged scotch, and the particular scent of wealth that comes from never having to worry about money.

Victoria Cross had delegated the planning to her executive assistant, a meticulous woman named Sarah Chan, who’d been told to invite people from the hospital who worked closely with Nathaniel.

Sarah, determined to be thorough, had gone through the surgical staff list and sent cream cards stockck invitations with gold embossing to every nurse Dr.

Cross regularly requested for his procedures.

All six received invitations.

All six came.

Tina had spent $890 on her outfit.

a deep blue dress from Nordstrom that she charged to a credit card already carrying $4,300 in debt.

She told herself that if Nathaniel was finally going public, if this invitation meant what she hoped it meant, then the dress was an investment in their future.

Mari wore soft pink, romantic and hopeful, a $340 dress she bought 3 weeks earlier, specifically imagining an occasion like this.

The ring hung on its chain beneath the neckline, hidden but present, a secret promise against her skin.

Sari had chosen black, elegant and understated, a $280 dress that reminded her of the one she’d worn to Miguel’s funeral.

She wasn’t sure why she’d picked something that carried such weight.

But grief had its own logic.

Lisa’s dress had cost $120 from a discount outlet, and she’d agonized over spending even that much.

The money could have bought textbooks for the twins, paid for Marco’s dental work, but Nathaniel had mentioned the party casually during one of their Saturday nights, and she’d felt the unspoken expectation that she should attend.

Ammy had spent $1,840, the most of any of them, on a designer dress that would photograph beautifully for Instagram.

She’d been planning the perfect shot all week, the one that would show her followers she belonged in spaces like this.

Gaia wore a simple black cocktail dress that cost $180.

Professional and unremarkable.

She’d come out of curiosity more than anything else.

Suspicious of why Victoria would suddenly acknowledge the nurses her husband worked with.

They’d arrived at different times between 7:15 and 7:45 p.

m.

Each making polite small talk with strangers, accepting champagne from servers in white gloves, pretending this was normal, pretending they belonged.

The collision happened gradually.

Then all at once, Tina was standing near the fireplace at 8:14 p.

m.

when she saw Nathaniel touch Mari’s shoulder.

It was a light touch, barely 3 seconds, but Tina knew that touch.

She’d felt it a thousand times, the particular way his fingers lingered, the slight squeeze that communicated intimacy.

Her stomach dropped.

She watched Mari’s face as Nathaniel moved away.

The woman was glowing, her eyes tracking him across the room with the kind of possessive affection that couldn’t be faked.

Tina’s hand tightened around her champagne flute.

15 ft away, Mari was experiencing her own recognition.

She’d noticed Sari watching Nathaniel with an expression Mari knew intimately because she’d seen it in her own mirror.

Longing mixed with the security of being loved, the warm certainty of belonging to someone.

But why would another nurse look at him that way? Sorry, meanwhile had gone cold.

She just witnessed Lisa’s entire body react to Nathaniel’s voice as he laughed at something a hospital board member said.

Lisa had turned toward that sound like a flower to sunlight, involuntary and complete.

And in that movement, Sari recognized the same helpless attraction she’d been feeling for 30 months.

Lisa was doing math in her head, her practical nurse’s brain cataloging evidence.

Ammy, the young, beautiful one from the weekend day shift, had positioned herself in Nathaniel’s sighteline, clearly waiting for acknowledgement.

The body language was unmistakable, flirtatious, familiar, intimate.

Ammy had noticed Gaia exchange a look with Nathaniel, something quick and knowing that spoke of shared secrets.

And Gaia, the cynic, the one who thought she understood the game, was watching all five other women with dawning horror.

At 8:31 p.

m.

, their eyes met across the crowded room.

Six women, six separate realizations, one devastating truth crystallizing simultaneously.

They moved toward each other without conscious decision.

Drawn together by the gravity of shared disaster.

They formed a small circle near the marble fireplace, away from the main flow of the party, but not quite hidden.

Up close, they could see it in each other’s faces, the same wound wearing different expressions.

Gaia spoke first, her voice flat.

Oh my god, he’s sleeping with all of us, isn’t he? The words hung in the air for exactly 3 seconds.

Then Tina’s champagne flute started shaking in her hand.

3 years, Tina whispered.

I’ve been with him for 3 years.

He said he was getting divorced.

He said I was.

Her voice cracked.

How long for you? 30 months, Mari said, her hand automatically going to the chain around her neck.

He gave me a ring.

His grandmother’s ring.

He said, “What ring?” Gaia interrupted.

“Let me see it.

” Mari pulled it out with trembling fingers.

The gold caught the light, the small diamond winking.

Gaia’s laugh was acid.

That’s not worth $12,000.

That’s barely worth 50.

Mari’s face went white.

No, he said.

He lied.

Sorry, said quietly, tears already running down her face.

He lies.

That’s what he does.

He told me he loved me, that I was his second chance after his wife.

After my husband died, he she couldn’t finish.

Lisa’s voice was steady, almost eerily calm.

How much money has he given you for anything? They started comparing.

Tina, the $2,300 loan for her mother’s surgery.

Mari, the $340 necklace and dinner bills averaging $180.

Sorry, the $890 grief therapy trip to California.

Lisa, the $500 monthly for her twins.

Ammy, the $1,200 handbag.

Gia, the $1,200 monthly consulting fee.

I make $847,000 a year, Gaia said, her voice hollow.

She’d looked up his salary months ago, doing her due diligence like the pragmatist she thought she was.

Combined, he’s spending maybe six grand a month on all six of us.

That’s less than his car payment.

The phones came out, screenshots of text messages, photos from restaurants, hotel rooms, weekend trips, video clips of intimate moments they treasured, thinking they were unique.

The evidence mounted, and with each revelation, the pattern became clearer.

He told all six that his favorite color was blue.

All six that they were the only person who truly understood him.

All six that his marriage was loveless, that Victoria was never home, that divorce was coming soon.

The words were identical, copied and pasted across six separate relationships like a form letter.

Jesus Christ, Ammy breathed.

We’re all using the same script.

He gave us all the same lines.

Not all the same, Tina said bitterly.

He tailored it for you, she gestured at Mari.

It was romance, poetry, and rings and destiny for you.

nodding at sorry.

It was grief counseling and second chances for you.

Looking at Lisa, it was saving your children.

He figured out what each of us needed most and sold it to us.

The timeline comparison was worse.

They discovered dates when he’d been with two of them in the same day, sometimes within hours.

A Friday afternoon with Sari at the Beacon Hill House, then Saturday night with Lisa in Dorchester.

Sunday brunch with Ammy along the Charles River while his phone buzzed with texts from Tina asking when she’d see him again.

It was 8:52 p.

m.

They’d been talking for 21 minutes.

Around them, the party continued, guests oblivious to the implosion happening near the fireplace.

Then Nathaniel noticed them.

He’d been accepting birthday congratulations from a hospital board member, his face arranged in the humble smile he perfected over decades of navigating professional politics.

when his eyes drifted across the room and found six Filipino nurses standing in a tight cluster.

Their body language was all wrong, tense, upset, and they were looking at their phones, then at each other, then around the room with expressions that made his blood run cold.

He excused himself mid-con conversation and walked toward them, his mind already cycling through damage control scenarios.

Play concerned, act confused, separate them before they compare too many notes.

Gaslight if necessary.

He talked his way out of tighter situations, but he was 15 feet away when Tina’s voice cut through the party chatter.

You [ __ ] monster.

The volume wasn’t quite a shout, but it carried.

Conversation stopped in expanding rings like a stone dropped in still water.

Heads turned.

The string quartet played on for three more bars before trailing into silence.

87 people turned to look.

Phones emerged from pockets and evening bags.

Someone later, police would determine it was a journalist from the Boston Globe, started recording.

Victoria appeared at Nathaniel’s elbow as if summoned, her face carefully neutral.

She was dressed in emerald green Dior, every inch the society wife, but her eyes were calculating, reading the room with the sharp intelligence that had made her family’s pharmaceutical empire thrive across four generations.

Amy’s voice cracked as she spoke.

Too loud, too public, too late to take back.

Your husband has been sleeping with all six of us for years.

The silence that followed lasted exactly 4.

7 seconds.

Multiple guests would later report the same duration, the kind of detail that becomes seared into memory during moments of spectacular social destruction.

Then the room exploded into whispers, gasps, the frantic clicking of phone cameras.

Nathaniel’s face arranged itself into wounded confusion.

The mask he’d worn so successfully for so long.

This is absurd.

These nurses are clearly disturbed, but the evidence was already flowing.

Six women, their shock overriding any instinct for discretion, were providing proof.

Tina thrust her phone forward, showing bank transfers.

You sent me $2,300 for my mother’s surgery.

February 14th, 2022.

Transaction ID847392.

Mari was crying now, pulling out the ring.

You gave me this.

You said it was your grandmother’s that it was worth $12,000.

It cost 47.

Sorry’s voice shook.

You know my husband died in 2019.

You know his name was Miguel.

You attended grief support group with me five times.

You met his family, Lisa.

Steady and devastating.

You send $500 a month for my twins education.

You FaceTime with them.

They call you Uncle Nate.

Ammy was scrolling through her phone showing photos.

We went to Cape Cod in June, to the Birkers in August.

You told me I made you feel young again.

Gaia, her voice flat.

You pay me 1,200 a month as a consulting fee.

You paid my immigration lawyer’s retainer, $4,500.

I have the receipts.

The details kept coming.

Specific and damning.

Nathaniel’s birthmark on his left inner thigh.

His mother Eleanor in Vermont.

His ritual of ordering salmon at Antonio’s restaurant.

his habit of leaving his wedding ring in the car before dates, the particular way he touched their lower backs, the identical words he whispered during sex.

A hospital board member, Dr.

Patricia Whitmore, who’d served on panels with Nathaniel for 7 years, pulled out her phone and stepped away from the crowd, already dialing the hospital’s legal counsel.

A donor, whose foundation had contributed $2.

4 million to the cardiac wing, set down his champagne and walked toward the door without a word.

The journalist from the Globe was still recording.

Her phone held steady, capturing everything.

Nathaniel’s mask was cracking.

His face flushed red, veins standing out on his neck.

You’re all This is You have no right to come into my home and your home.

Tina’s laugh was broken glass.

I’ve been in your bachelor apartment in Cambridge 57 times.

You said it was temporary until the divorce.

How many of us have been there? Five hands raised slowly.

And the Beacon Hill House, Tina continued.

The one you said Victoria was never at.

Twice, sorry, whispered.

Friday afternoons, he said she traveled constantly.

Victoria’s expression hadn’t changed, but something cold and final had entered her eyes.

She turned to the catering staff.

Get everyone out now.

The servers moved quickly, professional, and efficient, ushering guests toward the door with polite firmness.

The party guests left in a flood, already pulling out phones, texting, posting, spreading the scandal across Boston’s medical and social circles with the speed of digital wildfire.

By 9:14 p.

m.

, the house was empty except for eight people.

Nathaniel Cross, Victoria Cross, and six Filipino nurses whose lives he’d systematically destroyed.

Victoria walked to the front door and turned the deadbolt.

The sound echoed in the suddenly quiet house.

No one leaves until we settle this.

The living room that had hosted 87 guests now felt cavernous and cold.

Champagne glasses sat abandoned on every surface.

Halfeaten canopes littered silver trays.

A flower arrangement had been knocked over.

Water pooling on the mahogany side table, dripping onto the Persian rug worth $67,000.

The six nurses formed an unintentional semicircle facing Nathaniel.

Victoria stood apart, watching her arms crossed.

The atmosphere had shifted from shock to something darker.

Rage was building, mixing with humiliation with the devastating comprehension of exactly how much they’d each lost.

Tina had given him 3 years.

3 years of believing she was building towards something real.

She turned down a promotion that would have required relocating to New York because Nathaniel had said they’d need to stay in Boston for his work.

She’d lied to her family for 3 years, maintaining the fiction that she was too busy for relationships when her mother asked why she wasn’t dating.

Mari had planned a wedding.

She’d mentally invited 87 guests, had chosen her dress, had practiced her vows.

She told her mother in the Philippines that she’d found her soulmate, sent photos of the ring, promised to bring him home to meet the family.

Sari had betrayed Miguel’s memory.

She’d felt guilty for months about moving on, had talked to Miguel’s photo every night, asking for forgiveness, promising that Nathaniel was different, that Miguel would have wanted her to be happy.

Lisa had sacrificed time with her children.

Two years of their lives she could never get back.

Marco had lost his first tooth.

Maria had learned to read.

She’d missed it all, working double shifts to send money and please a man who was spending more on wine than he sent for her babies.

Ammy at 26 had developed an eating disorder.

She dropped from 128 pounds to 97 at her lowest.

Obsessed with staying young and beautiful for a man who saw her as subject number five.

Gaia had believed her cynicism protected her.

The woman who thought she couldn’t be fooled had been the biggest fool of all.

Say something, Tina demanded.

Explain this.

Explain how you looked me in the eye for 3 years and lied about everything.

Nathaniel opened his mouth, but Ammy cut him off.

Don’t Don’t try to charm us or manipulate us or explain it away.

We compared notes.

We have timelines.

We know everything.

You want to know the worst part? Lisa said quietly.

You’re still thinking you can talk your way out of this.

I can see it in your face.

You’re calculating which one of us is most vulnerable.

Who you can isolate and convince? Who will keep your secrets if you just say the right words? She was right.

They could all see it, even cornered, even caught.

Nathaniel Cross was still playing the game.

Victoria walked to Nathaniel’s home office, her heels clicking on the marble floor.

She returned carrying three leatherbound journals, the kind with built-in locks, expensive and substantial.

I found these 6 months ago, Victoria said, her voice eerily calm.

I was looking for tax documents.

These were in his locked desk drawer.

I had the locks changed on his desk while he was at a conference.

She set them on the coffee table.

You should read them.

Tina opened the first journal.

Her hands were shaking so badly that Mari had to help hold it steady.

The entries were dated, organized, clinical.

Nathaniel had written them in the same precise handwriting he used for surgical notes.

Subject one.

CA acquisition successful March 15, 20.

Vulnerability profile.

Intellectual insecurity masked by competence.

Father figure complex response to professional validation.

Compliance level eight out of 10.

Emotional dependency increasing as predicted.

Subject two.

Ms.

Romantic idealist.

Believes in fairy tales and soulmates.

The ring cost $47.

Told her $12,000.

Accepted without verification.

Manipulation ease 10/10.

will maintain relationship indefinitely with minimal investment.

Subject three.

RL widow grief vulnerable.

Positioning as grief counselor then replacement has proven highly effective.

She compares me favorably to deceased husband which ensures loyalty through guilt.

The journals went on pages and pages of clinical observations, ratings, comparisons, experiments.

Testing optimal gift to dependency ratio.

$500 per month to subject four has created stronger attachment than $2,300 one-time payment to subject one.

Recommend recurring smaller amounts over large single payments.

Subject five responds to youth validation.

She believes she seduced me which gives her sense of control.

Ironic.

Subject six believes transactional honesty protects her.

It actually creates unique trust dynamic.

Most interesting case study.

There were charts, graphs of emotional dependency over time, comparative analysis of which manipulation techniques yielded best results on different personality types.

Mari read one entry aloud, her voice breaking.

M cried after I mentioned marriage timeline today.

Dependency increasing exactly as planned.

The ring investment of $47 has returned estimated $8,000 in loyalty behaviors.

ROI exceptional.

Sorry found her entry.

R feels guilty about moving on from deceased husband.

This guilt creates control lever.

She’ll accept worse treatment than others because she believes she doesn’t deserve happiness.

Useful.

Lisa read hers in silence, then closed the journal carefully.

He calculated how much money would make me dependent without costing him too much.

$500 a month.

That’s what my children’s futures were worth to him.

Lab rat optimization.

They passed the journals between them, reading their own commodification, seeing themselves reduced to subjects and data points and experiments in control.

When they finished, Ammy set the final journal down on the coffee table.

Her hands were perfectly steady now.

She looked at Nathaniel with eyes that had aged a decade in the last hour.

“You’re not human,” she said simply.

“You’re a monster wearing a human face.

” It was 10:34 p.

m.

The party had started 3 hours and 34 minutes ago.

In that time, six lives had been destroyed.

One marriage had ended in all but name, and a career that had taken 30 years to build had collapsed.

But the night wasn’t over.

The worst was still to come.

The Harborview estate had been designed to project power and permanence.

The living room where eight people now stood featured crown molding installed by craftsmen in 1904.

windows that had witnessed two world wars, floors that had supported four generations of Boston’s elite.

The room had seen births and deaths, celebrations and funerals, the full spectrum of human experience.

But nothing like this.

Tina was the first to move.

She stood up from the sofa where she’d been sitting, the journal still open in her lap.

She walked toward Nathaniel with deliberate steps, her face blank.

Say it, she said.

Say what we were to you.

Nathaniel had been silent while they read his journals.

His lawyer’s instinct finally kicking in, telling him that every word could be used against him.

But three years of narcissistic control don’t die easily.

His ego wounded and cornered, demanded the last word.

“You want the truth?” His voice was cold now, the charm completely gone.

“Fine, you were all exactly what you looked like from the beginning.

desperate, vulnerable immigrants who’d do anything for a green card and a man with money.

You think you were special? You think any of this was real? He was standing now, too.

His face flushed with rage and humiliation.

The mask he’d worn so carefully had shattered, and beneath it was something ugly.

You’re nurses.

You make 70,000 a year.

I make almost a million.

You spread your legs for someone important, for money, for stability.

And now you’re acting like victims.

You knew what this was.

Every single one of you knew.

We knew.

Mari’s voice was shrill.

You told me you loved me.

You gave me a ring.

You talked about our wedding, a $47 ring.

Nathaniel’s laugh was cruel.

And you never even questioned it.

You wanted to believe so badly that you never did basic research.

That’s not my fault.

That’s your stupidity.

He turned to Tina.

You always were too desperate.

I could smell the need on you from the first day.

Daddy issues and poverty mentality.

Thinking that landing a doctor would fix everything your father broke to.

Sorry, your husband’s been dead for 4 years.

You really think he’d be proud of you now? [ __ ] another woman’s husband using his memory as an excuse.

To Lisa, 500 a month for your kids.

That was barely my bar tab.

You sold yourself cheap.

You sold your integrity for less than I spend on wine.

To Ammy, you’re 26 now.

You’ll be 40 before you know it.

Doing the same thing to some other desperate man.

The only thing you have is youth, and that’s temporary.

To Gaia, at least you were honest about being a [ __ ] The others were stupid enough to think this was love.

The words landed like physical blows.

Each woman flinched.

The specific cruelty of each insult calibrated to hit exactly where they were most vulnerable.

But then Nathaniel made his fatal mistake.

He turned to all six of them, his face twisted with contempt.

You’re all delusional.

You’re immigrants, service staff.

You were supposed to understand your place.

You were just bartenders serving drinks to your betters.

He caught himself, but too late.

The Freudian slip revealed something deeper, older.

Some previous conquest, some other woman he’d destroyed.

For Tina, those words, just bartenders serving drinks to your beds, ignited something primal.

Every moment of being dismissed for her background.

Every time the porters had looked down on Samantha.

No, wait, wrong memory.

Every time doctors had talked over her in surgery.

Every time her father had told her she was worthless.

Every time she’d felt less than because of where she came from and how much money she made.

It all crystallized into pure burning rage.

The crystal decanter was on the bar cart.

Heavy cut crystal, probably Waterford, worth around $800.

It had been a wedding gift to Victoria from her godmother.

It was filled with 18-year-old scotch.

Tina grabbed it.

The weight was substantial, 4.

7 lb full.

She swung it at Nathaniel’s head with all the strength of someone who’d spent 12 years lifting patients, moving equipment, working double shifts.

Nathaniel saw it coming and tried to dodge, but he was standing with his back near the fireplace.

The decanter connected with his left temple with a sound like a watermelon hitting concrete.

blood.

Immediate and shocking.

A cut opened above his eyebrow and blood poured down his face, into his eye, onto his expensive white shirt.

“You [ __ ] bitch.

” Nathaniel lunged toward Tina, his hands reaching for her throat.

But Mari was already moving.

The fireplace poker iron 28 in long with a brass handle was in her hands before she consciously decided to grab it.

She swung it at Nathaniel’s reaching arms.

The poker connected with his right forearm.

The sound of bone breaking was distinct, clear.

Nathaniel screamed.

Sorry, grabbed the marble bookend from the side table.

8 lbs of Italian marble shaped like a horse’s head.

A decorative piece Victoria had bought in Florence.

She threw it.

Hit Nathaniel in the chest as he staggered back from Mari’s blow.

The impact drove the air from his lungs.

He fell against the fireplace mantle, then slid down to the Persian rug.

Lisa was crying as she picked up the bronze sculpture, an abstract figure, 12 lbs of solid bronze.

She lifted it over her head and brought it down on Nathaniel’s left knee.

The kneecap shattered.

Ammy grabbed a crystal vase filled with water and two dozen roses.

She smashed it against the side of Nathaniel’s head.

Crystal shards mixed with blood.

Rose petals stuck to the blood running down his face.

Gaia used her fists.

She’d grown up with three brothers in Pampanga, had learned to fight before she learned to read.

She kicked Nathaniel in the ribs, hearing them crack.

Then again and again, they swarmed him.

Six women, each channeling different pain, different betrayals, different breaking points.

Tina hit him again with the decanter.

Three years of lies poured into each blow.

Mari used the fireplace poker like a baseball bat.

The fake ring, the fake future, the fake love.

Sorry was sobbing as she hit him with the marble bookend.

Forgiveness for betraying Miguel’s memory by believing another liar.

Lisa thought about Marco and Maria calling him Uncle Nate.

The phone calls where he’d seemed to care.

All of it performance.

Ammy was making sounds like a wounded animal.

26 years old and already destroyed.

Her youth and beauty weaponized against her.

Gaia was silent and efficient.

the pragmatist who’d thought she understood the game, discovering she’d been played harder than anyone.

Victoria watched from 15 ft away.

Her face was blank, emotionless.

She didn’t call for help.

Didn’t try to stop them.

Didn’t reach for her phone.

She just stood there, arms crossed, watching her husband die.

The violence lasted 8 minutes and 34 seconds.

Victoria would later recall the exact duration.

She glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner at 10:39 p.

m.

when Tina grabbed the decanter.

She’d looked again at 10:47 p.

m.

when the movement finally stopped.

By then, Dr.

Nathaniel Cross, 52 years old, chief of cardiotheric surgery at Riverside Memorial Hospital, was dead on the Persian rug his wife’s grandmother had brought from Iran.

His face was unrecognizable.

His blood soaked into 200-year-old silk.

The six nurses stood there breathing hard, covered in blood spatter, weapons still in their hands.

The reality of what they’ done crashed over them like a wave.

Ammy vomited in the corner.

The sound of wretching filled the silence.

Mari collapsed, her legs giving out.

She sat on the floor, still holding the fireplace poker, hyperventilating.

Sorry couldn’t stop shaking.

Her teeth were chattering so violently she bit her tongue, adding her own blood to the mess.

Lisa dropped the bronze sculpture.

It hit the marble floor with a clang that made everyone jump.

She stared at her hands covered in blood, trembling the hands that had held her children that had helped heal patients that had just killed a man.

Gaia lit a cigarette with shaking fingers.

The flame from her lighter wavered.

She took a deep drag, the normaly of the action surreal against the backdrop of violence.

Tina looked at Victoria.

Her voice came out flat, emotionless, shocked.

“Call the police,” Victoria’s response was immediate and calm.

“No.

” The word hung in the blood-sented air.

“We need to call the police,” Tina repeated.

But her voice was less certain now.

“Listen to me very carefully,” Victoria said, her tone like she was explaining something simple to children.

“You’re going to do exactly what I say.

If you don’t, you’ll all go to prison for murder.

Firstderee murder.

you’ll die in prison, but if you listen to me, if you follow my instructions exactly, you all walk away from this.

” She was terrifyingly calm.

As if she’d been planning this, as if she’d known exactly how this night would end.

Mari’s voice came out strangled.

We can say it was self-defense.

He attacked Tina with six of you against one man for 8 and 1/2 minutes.

That’s not self-defense.

That’s murder.

Victoria walked closer to them, careful to avoid the blood pooling on the rug.

The security cameras have been disabled since this afternoon.

I shut them off before the party started.

No footage of the fight.

No proof of what happened except your word against physical evidence that will show extended brutal violence.

“Why would you help us?” Gaia asked, her cynical mind still working even in shock.

Victoria’s smile was cold.

Because Nathaniel was a monster.

because monsters should stay buried.

And because those guests who witnessed your confrontation included two journalists, three of my family’s business rivals and a board member who’s been trying to undermine me.

By tomorrow morning, the story of Nathaniel’s affairs will be everywhere.

When he goes missing, everyone will assume he fled in shame.

No one will look for a body.

She pulled out her phone and showed them something.

Photos.

Six photos of six women unconscious from exhaustion, covered in blood, collapsed around Nathaniel’s body.

She’d taken them while they’d been in shock, too stunned to notice.

Insurance, Victoria said.

In case any of you get stupid ideas about confessing or running.

You help me bury him or these photos go to the police.

Your choice, Tina stared at her.

You planned this.

I planned for him to die.

Victoria admitted.

I didn’t plan for you to kill him, but I certainly wasn’t going to stop you.

She walked to the fireplace and picked up a leather folder that had been on the mantle.

Let me show you why.

Inside were documents, sealed records from Cleveland Clinic, a confidential settlement agreement, a death certificate, Angelica Domingo, Victoria said.

2019, Cleveland.

Nathaniel did the same thing there.

Three nurses, same pattern.

Angelica discovered the others, confronted him.

He destroyed her career.

False reports, manufactured complaints, systematic professional annihilation.

She lost her nursing license.

She pulled out a photocopy of a suicide note.

The handwriting was shaky, desperate.

I loved a monster who killed me slowly, piece by piece, until nothing was left but the rope and the choice to end what he’d already destroyed.

She hanged herself 6 months after he ruined her.

Victoria said.

Cleveland Clinic paid the family $250,000 and buried it.

Nathaniel kept the sealed file in his office as a trophy.

The six nurses stared at the documents.

A seventh victim, one who hadn’t survived.

I found this file 8 months ago, Victoria continued.

That’s when I started planning.

I threw this party specifically to create a collision.

I invited all of you deliberately.

I disabled the cameras deliberately.

I wanted you to discover each other.

I didn’t know you’d kill him, but I hoped someone would finally make him pay for what he was.

You used us, Tina said.

He used you first, Victoria replied.

I just gave you the opportunity for revenge.

You took it.

Now we finish what you started.

She outlined the plan.

The wine seller had an excavation in progress.

Foundation repair.

Contractor not due back for 13 days.

They would bury Nathaniel in the cellar.

pour concrete over him.

She would report him missing in 3 days.

Claim he’d left for a medical conference in Chicago and never arrived.

His phone, his wallet, his clothes.

I’ll dispose of them properly, Victoria said.

I’ve already made cash withdrawals from his accounts over the past 2 months.

Planted search history on his laptop about international flights.

When I report him missing, the evidence will support that he fled.

Why would he flee? Lisa asked.

Because by tomorrow, everyone in Boston will know about his six simultaneous affairs with immigrant nurses.

Victoria said, “The scandal alone would have destroyed his career.

The hospital will want this buried as badly as I do.

They’ll believe he ran.

It was brilliant.

It was insane.

It was their only chance at avoiding life in prison.

” “What do you get out of this?” Gaia asked.

Victoria looked at the urn on the mantelpiece.

“Empty now, but it wouldn’t be for long.

Justice for Angelica Domingo.

Justice for every woman he ever destroyed.

And the satisfaction of knowing he died knowing he’d lost control.

She turned back to them.

You have 30 seconds to decide.

Help me bury him or I call the police right now and you all spend the rest of your lives in prison for murder.

30 seconds of silence.

Six women looking at each other at the body on the floor at their bloodcovered hands.

At the impossible choice that wasn’t really a choice at all.

Tina nodded first, then Mari.

Sorry, Lisa.

Ammy, finally Gia.

Good.

Victoria said, then we have work to do.

It was 11:08 p.

m.

on October 12th, 2023.

Dr.

Nathaniel Cross had been dead for 21 minutes.

The crime scene cleanup was about to begin, and seven women were about to become bound by a secret that would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

The descent to the wine celler required navigating two flights of stairs.

Each step 18 in wide, worn smooth by 119 years of footsteps.

Nathaniel Cross weighed 185 lbs, and dead weight was always heavier than living flesh.

The six nurses and Victoria worked in pairs, dragging the body wrapped in industrial plastic sheeting that Victoria had retrieved from a storage closet.

It was 11:23 p.

m.

when they started.

By 12:47 a.

m.

, they’d finally gotten the body into the cellar.

The wine celler was 40 feet by 24 feet with stone walls that dated to the original construction in 1904.

The excavation section measured 8 ft x 12 ft.

Victoria’s contractor had been repairing foundation damage, exposing the original stonework and dirt floor beneath decades of poured concrete.

The contractor, a man named Tommy Sullivan, had left his tools neatly arranged.

Shovels, tels, bags of quick lime he’d been using to stabilize the soil, and 34 bags of concrete mix stacked in the corner.

Victoria had been planning this for months.

The timing was too perfect to be coincidence.

Lisa vomited twice during the descent, her stomach heaving as they maneuvered Nathaniel’s corpse around a corner.

The plastic sheeting was slick with blood, making it difficult to grip.

Ammy couldn’t stop crying, her mascara running in black streaks down her face, mixing with blood spatter she hadn’t been able to wash off yet.

Her hands were blistering from gripping the plastic.

“We need to move faster,” Victoria said, checking her watch.

It was a Cardier worth $23,000, and it had a single drop of her husband’s blood on the crystal face.

She wiped it clean with her thumb.

We have 6 hours until dawn.

The neighbors will notice if we’re still making noise after sunrise.

The excavated section looked like an open grave because that’s exactly what it was about to become.

Victoria directed them with clinical precision, pointing to where they should lay the body, how to position it to minimize the amount of concrete they’d need to pour.

Quick climb first, she instructed, pointing to the bags Tommy Sullivan had left.

It accelerates decomposition, makes the body break down faster.

How do you know that? Sari asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Victoria didn’t answer.

She just handed Sorry a bag of quick lime and a pair of industrial gloves.

They poured six bags of quick lime over Nathaniel’s plastic wrapped body.

The white powder settled over the black plastic like snow.

Gaia, who’d grown up Catholic, made the sign of the cross without thinking, then laughed bitterly at herself.

What God forgave murder.

At 1:14 a.

m.

The body was in the ground covered in quick lime.

Now came the concrete.

Mixing concrete by hand is brutal work.

The ratio is specific.

One part cement, two parts sand, three parts gravel, just enough water to make it workable, but not soupy.

They had to mix 847 lb of concrete across 34 bags.

Victoria had done the math.

The excavation was 96 cubic feet, which required approximately 850 lb to fill to the proper depth.

They worked in rotation.

Two women mixing while the others rested, then switching.

The muscles in their arms screamed.

Their backs achd.

Their hands, even with gloves, developed blisters that burst and bled.

Mari worked like a machine.

Her mind somewhere else entirely.

She was thinking about the wedding she’d planned.

The harbor chapel, the pink and gold decorations, the dress she’ picked from a boutique in Newberry Street.

Dollar2 800.

Saved for over 18 months.

She’d been going to wear her hair up.

Her mother was going to fly in from the Philippines.

There would have been 87 guests.

She’d made a list.

She’d addressed it in her mind a hundred times.

Now she was mixing concrete to bury the groom.

Tina’s thoughts were darker.

She kept seeing her father’s face.

The man she’d sworn she’d never become.

The drunk who’d beaten her mother, who’ terrorized seven children, who died of liver failure when Tina was 19.

She’d promised herself she’d never be powerless like her mother.

She’d promised she’d never depend on a man.

She’d promised she’d never use violence.

She’d broken every promise.

And worse, she’d become the thing she hated.

Not her father exactly, but something just as broken.

Someone who could kill.

The concrete mixing continued.

1:34 a.

m.

became 2:47 a.

m.

became 4:23 a.

m.

Their clothes were soaked with sweat despite the October chill in the unheated cellar.

The concrete dust covered everything, turning them into ghostlike figures moving in the dim light of construction lamps Victoria had set up.

Lisa’s mind was on her children.

Marco and Maria were 9 hours ahead in Manila.

It was 2:23 p.

m.

there.

They’d be getting home from school.

Her mother would give them marianda, probably pandisal with spam or maybe banana cue if they’d been good.

Marco would do his homework at the kitchen table.

Maria would practice her reading.

They were growing up without her.

Two years she’d been gone.

Two years of their lives she’d missed.

All to please a man who’d seen her as subject number four, worth exactly $500 per month in manipulation costs.

she’d killed for those children to protect the money that fed them, educated them, gave them futures, and now they’d grow up knowing their mother was a [ __ ] who’d slept with a married man.

The Boston News had already reached Philippine media.

Her parents had seen the headlines.

Her children would see them eventually.

By 5:47 a.

m.

, they were pouring the final mixture.

The concrete filled the excavation, covering the quick lime, the plastic sheeting.

the man who destroyed seven lives and ended one with his own cruelty.

They smoothed it with trowels, making it level with the existing floor.

In two days, when it cured, it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the cellar floor.

The seven women stood there, covered in concrete dust and dried blood, breathing hard in the dim light.

The grandfather clock upstairs chimed six times.

Dawn was breaking over Boston Harbor.

“Go home,” Victoria said.

Burn your clothes.

Shower.

Sleep if you can.

Tomorrow you go to work.

You act normal.

This night never happened.

They left separately.

Each taking different routes home.

Tina walked the three miles to her apartment in Alustin, unwilling to call an Uber and create a digital record of her location.

Mari took the tea, sitting alone in an empty car at 6:14 a.

m.

Watching her reflection in the dark window.

Sorry drove, gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles went white.

Lisa called a cab from a pay phone six blocks away.

Ammy walked until she found a 24-hour diner, sat in a booth for 40 minutes staring at coffee she couldn’t drink, then took a cab.

Gaia smoked three cigarettes on the walk to her car, then sat in the driver’s seat for 20 minutes before she could make her hands work well enough to turn the key.

Each of them went home.

Each burned their clothes in bathtubs, incinerators, fireplaces.

Each showered until the water ran cold.

Each stared at ceilings as sunlight crept across their walls.

Each failed to sleep.

October 13th, 2023.

The first day of the rest of their lives.

The hospital gossip started before they even arrived for their shifts.

The story had spread through social media overnight.

The six nurses, the confrontation, the public humiliation.

By 700 a.

m.

, #Boston doctor scandal was trending locally on Twitter.

By 9:00 a.

m.

, the Boston Globe had a story online.

Prominent surgeon accused of multiple affairs with hospital staff.

Tina worked her night shift that evening with robotic precision.

Her hands, the same hands that had swung a crystal decanter into a human skull, now checked vitals, administered medications, adjusted for drips.

A patient in room 437 thanked her for her gentle touch.

She smiled and said, “Just doing my job.

” The night shift supervisor, Karen Chun, pulled her aside around 2:00 a.

m.

“I saw the news.

“Are you okay?” “If you need time off, “I’m fine,” Tina said.

Her voice was steady inside.

She was screaming.

“It was just an uncomfortable situation.

I’d rather work.

Work was safety.

Work was routine.

Work meant not thinking about what her hands had done.

Mari lasted three days before she had a panic attack during a shift.

She was in the supply closet counting medication doses when her chest tightened.

She couldn’t breathe.

The walls were closing in.

She saw Nathaniel’s face, not broken and bloody, but smiling at her the way he used to.

The ghost was more terrifying than the corpse.

She took medical leave on October 16th.

By October 23rd, she’d flown back to the Philippines, telling her family she needed a break from Boston’s cold weather and stressful work environment.

But the guilt followed her across oceans.

She couldn’t sleep.

The same nightmare every night.

Nathaniel rising from wet concrete, his face reconstructing itself, pointing at her, saying, “You killed me for a $47 ring.

Sorry.

” Kept seeing Nathaniel in hospital corridors.

She turned a corner and there he’d be.

Except it wasn’t him.

it was Dr.

Patterson or Dr.

Rodriguez or just a trick of light and trauma.

She stopped sleeping more than two hours at a time.

The insomnia was brutal.

She’d lie in bed staring at the ceiling, feeling Miguel’s disappointment like a weight on her chest.

She’d betrayed his memory twice.

Once by sleeping with Nathaniel, again by killing him on November 8th, she nearly killed a patient.

She was preparing a morphine dose 10 mg, but her exhausted brain almost drew up 100 mg.

Another nurse caught the error.

Sorry was placed on administrative leave pending review.

She didn’t fight it.

She deserved worse than suspension.

Lisa’s family found out about the affair when Philippine media picked up the story.

Boston nurse scandal made headlines in Manila newspapers.

Her mother called her on October 17th, voice cold with shame.

We’re keeping Marco and Maria permanently.

Her mother said, “You’re not fit to be their mother.

what you did.

Sleeping with a married man, destroying a family.

You’ve shamed us all.

Mama, please.

They don’t want to talk to you.

They’re embarrassed.

Their classmates are teasing them about their mother being a a cabb.

The Tagalog word for mistress landed like a slap.

The call ended.

Lisa sat in her studio apartment in Dorchester, staring at the wall where photos of her twins were taped.

She’d killed a man to protect the money that supported them.

Now they were gone anyway.

The irony was suffocating.

She worked three jobs after that.

Her nursing position, weekend shifts at a clinic, overnight work at a 24-hour urgent care.

She sent money to the Philippines.

Her parents returned every payment.

Uncash checks arriving in the mail like accusations.

She’d lost her children, her family, her integrity.

The guilt ate her alive, but she couldn’t stop sending money.

It was all she knew how to do.

Ammy stopped eating.

The guilt manifested as visceral revulsion to food.

She put a fork to her mouth and taste blood.

See Nathaniel’s face in her plate.

Her weight dropped from 128 lb to 112, then 103, then 97.

Her supervisor noticed and mandated she see a therapist.

She went.

She lied.

I’m stressed about the scandal.

People recognize me from the news.

I’m having trouble adjusting.

The therapist prescribed anti-anxiety medication and recommended she take a leave of absent.

Ammy refused.

Work was the only thing keeping her from completely falling apart.

At night, she drank cheap wine from corner stores, $8 bottles she consumed alone in her apartment, drinking until the memory of swinging that crystal vase faded into blessed numbness.

Gaia was the most functional, which terrified her.

She went to work, performed her duties, came home and felt nothing.

She’d killed a man and couldn’t access any emotion about it.

The pragmatist who’d thought cynicism protected her had discovered that her emotional numbness went deeper than philosophy.

It was pathology.

She kept a gun in her nightstand.

A Glock 19 purchased legally after taking a firearm safety course.

She told herself it was for protection.

Boston could be dangerous for a woman living alone.

But late at night when she couldn’t sleep, she’d take the gun out, feel its weight, and wonder how much courage it would take to put it in her mouth.

She hadn’t found that courage yet, but she kept the gun loaded just in case.

Meanwhile, Victoria performed her role perfectly.

On October 14th, she hosted a lunch with friends at Sorelina, ordering the branzino and laughing at jokes about Boston politics.

She mentioned casually that Nathaniel was at a medical conference in Chicago presenting research on minimally invasive valve replacements.

On October 15th at 2:34 p.

m.

, she called Boston Police Department’s non-emergency line.

Her voice was perfectly calibrated, worried, but not hysterical, concerned, but not panicked.

I’d like to report my husband missing.

Dr.

Nathaniel Cross.

He left for a medical conference in Chicago 3 days ago and never checked in.

His phone goes straight to voicemail.

This isn’t like him.

The investigation began immediately.

Missing person cases involving prominent citizens received priority treatment.

Detective Marcus Chen, 47 years old with 19 years on the force and 127 close cases, caught the assignment.

He interviewed Victoria at the Harborview estate on October 16th.

She served him coffee in the same living room where her husband had died.

The Persian rug was gone, ruined by spilled wine during the party, she explained.

The new rug had cost $12,000 and looked like it had been there for years.

When did you last see your husband? Detective Chun asked notebook open.

The night of his birthday party, October 12th.

We had a difficult evening.

I’m sure you’ve seen the news about the scandal.

Chun had seen it.

The entire Boston PD had seen it.

Six nurses, simultaneous affairs, public humiliation.

It was the kind of scandal that made careers implode.

He was upset after the guests left,” Victoria continued.

Humiliated, angry.

He packed a bag around midnight, said he needed time to think.

I assumed he’d cool off and come home, but he never did.

Where did he say he was going? A medical conference, the American College of Cardiology symposium in Chicago.

He was scheduled to present on the 14th, but the conference organizers called yesterday.

He never showed up, never checked into his hotel.

His presentation slot went unfilled.

Detective Chun made notes.

The timeline was concerning.

3 days missing, no contact, no credit card usage after October 12th.

Phone last pinged a cell tower near Beacon Hill at 10:47 p.

m.

that night, then went dark.

Did your husband have access to significant cash? Victoria nodded.

I checked our accounts.

He withdrew $23,000 over the past six weeks.

Small amounts, $2,000 to $4,000 at a time.

I didn’t think much of it.

Nathaniel often dealt in cash for various expenses.

That was a lie.

Victoria had made those withdrawals herself using Nathaniel’s ATM card.

The PIN had been their anniversary.

0615.

Chun interviewed the six nurses over the next 3 days.

each told the same story, and their consistency both helped and hindered the investigation.

Yes, they’d been involved with Dr.

Cross.

Yes, they’d discovered each other at the party.

Yes, they’d confronted him publicly.

Then they’d left.

They had no idea where he’d gone.

Their alibis were weak, home alone, no witnesses, but there was no evidence of foul play, no body, no blood, no signs of struggle anywhere except the emotional devastation visible in their faces.

On October 24th, Detective Chun searched the Harborview estate.

He walked through every room, including the wine celler.

He noted the fresh concrete.

Renovation project? He asked Victoria.

Foundation repair, she explained, showing him the contractor’s invoice dated September 28th.

Nathaniel insisted on preserving the original 1904 stonework.

He was obsessive about historical integrity.

Tommy Sullivan’s invoice was real.

Victoria had simply continued his work after he’d left.

The concrete she and the nurses had poured looked identical to the section Tommy had completed two weeks earlier.

Detective Chun didn’t look closer.

The concrete appeared normal, properly cured, no different from the surrounding floor.

He made a note about ongoing renovations and moved on.

The financial investigation revealed a pattern consistent with a man planning to disappear.

cash withdrawals, laptop search history showing international flights to countries without extradition treaties, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines.

Nathaniel’s passport was missing from his office safe.

Actually, Victoria had his passport.

She’d burned it in the fireplace along with his wallet and phone, but she’d planted the search history weeks earlier, creating a digital trail that supported the narrative of voluntary flight.

By November 30th, the case went cold.

Nathaniel Cross was officially classified as a missing person.

Presumed to have fled the country after professional disgrace.

Interpol was notified but gave it low priority.

Just another disgraced professional running from consequences.

The hospital moved quickly to contain the scandal.

On October 21st, the board of directors held an emergency session.

By October 23rd, they’d reached out to the six nurses through lawyers.

The offer, $150,000 each, plus non-disclosure agreements and voluntary resignations.

The nurses took the money.

What choice did they have? It was blood money, hush money, survival money, $900,000 total to bury a scandal that was already burying them.

They signed the NDAs on October 28th.

They submitted resignation letters on November 2nd, effective November 15th.

By the end of November, all six had left Riverside Memorial Hospital.

The murder was perfect.

No body, no witnesses, no evidence, no conviction possible, even if someone suspected the truth.

But murder has a way of eating the soul from the inside.

6 months after that October night, the psychological unraveling was complete.

Ammy broke first, walking into St.

Augustine’s Church in South Boston on a cold April morning.

She found Father Patrick O’Brien in the confessional and told him everything.

The affair, the confrontation, the murder, the burial, the concrete.

Father O’Brien, bound by the seal of confession, couldn’t report it to police.

But he urged her to turn herself in.

“Your soul needs peace, child.

This guilt will destroy you.

” “I can’t,” Ammy whispered.

“Well go to prison.

Life sentences.

I can’t do that to them.

” She left the church and started drinking in earnest.

8 to 12 drinks every night.

Anything to silence the screaming in her head.

Mari’s panic attacks escalated to seven or eight per week.

She couldn’t work, couldn’t function.

In May 2024, she attempted suicide, swallowing 47 sleeping pills, one for every dollar the ring had cost.

Her roommate found her unconscious and called paramedics.

She survived barely.

She was institutionalized for 60 days, diagnosed with severe PTSD and dissociative episodes.

She told the therapists about guilt over an affair, but never mentioned murder.

The medication they gave her created a blessed numbness.

She preferred numb to feeling.

The others deteriorated more slowly, but just as completely took a job at a hospice, helping people die peacefully, whispering forgiveness to patients who never understood she was really talking to herself.

Lisa worked herself to exhaustion, sending money her family wouldn’t accept, standing on the Mass Avenue Bridge and thinking about jumping.

Gaia ran a support group for abuse survivors while keeping a loaded gun in her nightstand.

And Tina drank every night alone in her apartment.

She became the father she’d sworn she’d never become.

The cycle hadn’t ended.

It had metastasized.

October 12th, 2024, 1 year to the day after the murder.

Six identical text messages appeared on six phones at 11:47 p.

m.

Wine seller midnight.

All of you don’t make me ask twice.

The They came.

Of course they came.

Victoria owned them.

The Harborview estate looked menacing in darkness.

Windows reflecting moonlight like blank eyes.

They entered one by one, drawn by obligation and fear to the place where their lives had ended.

Victoria waited in the wine celler, standing on Nathaniel’s grave.

Black pants, black turtleneck, hair pulled back.

She looked tired but composed.

The six nurses descended the stairs looking worse than a year ago.

Tina had aged a decade.

Mari had gained 40 lb from medication.

Sar’s hands shook constantly.

Lisa looked like she’d stopped sleeping months ago.

Ammy had the hollowedeyed stare of an alcoholic.

Gaia’s expression was emotionally dead.

I’m selling the house, Victoria said without preamble.

Moving to London permanently.

The sale closes in 6 weeks.

The new owners want complete renovation.

Professional contractors will tear up this floor.

The implications were immediate and terrifying.

You planned this, Tina said.

You’ve been planning this since the beginning.

I’ve been planning since I found Angelica Domingo’s file, Victoria replied.

Since I realized my husband was a serial predator who’d driven a woman to suicide and kept her death as a trophy.

Yes, I planned the party.

I planned for you to discover each other.

I didn’t plan for you to kill him, but I wasn’t going to stop you.

She showed them photos on her phone.

Six women unconscious from exhaustion, collapsed around a corpse covered in blood.

The insurance policy she’d held for a year.

We move the body tonight.

dispose of it permanently or we all go down when contractors find it.

I’ve kept evidence, bank records showing I paid each of you $50,000 after the murder.

That makes you all accompllices.

We’re bound together forever.

You’re a monster, Ammy whispered.

No, Victoria said calmly.

I’m a survivor.

Nathaniel was the monster.

You all got justice, too.

He destroyed you and you fought back.

The difference is I don’t feel guilty about it.

She outlined the plan.

Dig up the body.

Industrial barrels.

A meat processing plant in western Massachusetts.

Her family owned.

Industrial incinerators for biological waste.

By dawn, he’ll be ash, Victoria said.

Scattered in Boston Harbor.

Some I’ll keep as insurance.

Then we’re done.

You never see me again.

This night ends everything.

We don’t have a choice, Gaia said.

You never did, Victoria replied.

They worked through the night for the second time.

Breaking through concrete was brutal.

The jackhammer was deafeningly loud, but the nearest neighbor was 300 ft away.

What they uncovered at 2:34 a.

m.

was nightmare fuel.

The quick lime had done its work.

Nathaniel Cross was barely recognizable as human.

Decomposed flesh, exposed bone, plastic sheeting melted and fused to remains.

The smell was indescribable.

They sealed the remains in three industrial barrels, loaded them into a refrigerated truck Victoria had rented under a Shell company name.

The drive to Metobrook processing plant took 3 hours and 47 minutes.

They arrived at 6:47 a.

m.

as dawn broke.

The facility was closed on Sundays.

Victoria had security codes and knew the manager schedule.

Her family had owned the property for 30 years.

The industrial incinerator burned at 1,800° F.

They fed Nathaniel cross into the flames and watched him become ash.

By 9:23 a.

m.

it was done.

Victoria collected some ash in an ornate wedgewood earn worth $890.

The rest she’d scatter in Boston Harbor that afternoon.

Before they left, Victoria handed each nurse an envelope containing $50,000 in cash.

“I don’t want your money,” Tina said.

“It’s not a gift,” Victoria replied.

“It’s another chain.

You accept money to help cover up murder.

That’s conspiracy after the fact.

Federal crime insurance.

They took the money.

They always had to.

That’s how Victoria had designed everything.

She left for London on November 4th, 2024.

She never saw the six nurses again.

3 years later, the lives Victoria had manipulated remained broken.

Dr.

Nathaniel Cross was officially a cold case.

His leaked journals were now used in medical ethics courses as examples of sociopathic behavior and institutional failure.

His name became shorthand for systematic exploitation of immigrant workers.

He was dead, but his legacy lived as a cautionary tale.

Victoria Cross ran European pharmaceutical operations from a Mayfair penthouse.

Net worth $89 million.

She gave occasional interviews about workplace harassment, always mentioning her late husband with calculated regret.

My husband was a predator.

I didn’t see it until too late.

I hope the women he hurt have found peace.

Only seven people knew the truth, and six were too destroyed to speak.

In her London penthouse, Victoria kept Nathaniel’s ashes in the Wedgwood ern on the mantelpiece.

Late at night, wine in hand, she talked to it.

You thought they were weak.

You thought I was complicit.

You thought you were untouchable.

You were wrong about everything.

They killed you with their hands.

But I killed you the moment I planned that party.

The six nurses fates were darker.

Celestina Tina Abbya returned to the Philippines, taught elementary school, never dated again.

She woke every night at 10:39 p.

m.

the exact moment she’d struck the first blow.

She drank 8 to 10 drinks nightly.

37.

She looked 50.

She was becoming her father.

Mari Mari Santos never recovered from her suicide attempt.

She lived in a care facility in Quesan City.

Heavily medicated, diagnosed with severe PTSD.

The medication kept her numb.

She preferred it that way.

Rosario Sari Lim worked at Peaceful Transitions Hospice in Manila.

She held dying patients hands and whispered, “You’re forgiven.

” She meant herself.

She couldn’t enter basement or watch concrete being poured.

She couldn’t sleep more than 2 hours without nightmares.

Dallas Lisa Reyes lost everything.

Her children wouldn’t speak to her.

Her family disowned her.

She worked three jobs, sent money.

They returned unopened.

She stood on Mass Avenue Bridge twice a month looking at the water 145 ft below.

Thinking about jumping.

Amihan Ammy Cruz was 29 but looked 50.

She tried to confess twice.

Police didn’t believe her.

A journalist wanted proof she couldn’t provide.

No one believed her.

She was trapped in a truth no one would accept.

Her weight fluctuated between 97 and 112 lb.

The eating disorder was permanent.

Lega Gaia Marcato, now legally Grace Reyes, still lived in Boston.

She worked in psychiatric nursing and ran support groups for abuse survivors.

The irony that she’d murdered her abuser wasn’t lost on her.

The Glock 19 stayed in her nightstand, loaded, waiting for the day courage and despair finally aligned.

But the darkest truth was Angelica Domingo, the seventh victim, the one who hadn’t survived.

Nathaniel had run the same pattern at Cleveland Clinic from 2017 to 2019.

Three Filipino nurses, simultaneous affairs.

Angelica discovered the others in March 2019.

She confronted Nathaniel, threatening to report him.

He destroyed her systematically, false competence reports, manufactured medication errors.

Within 4 months, Angelica lost her nursing license, couldn’t find work, couldn’t send money home to Cebu, couldn’t see a future.

Her suicide note, dated August 17th, 2019, was three pages long.

It named Nathaniel explicitly.

I loved a monster who killed me slowly, piece by piece, until nothing was left but the rope and the choice to end what he’d already destroyed.

Cleveland Clinic buried it, paid her family $250,000, sealed the records, protected their star surgeon.

Nathaniel kept the sealed file as a trophy.

Victoria found it 8 months before the birthday party.

That’s when she started planning not just his death, but the perfect opportunity for it.

She’d hoped someone would finally make him pay.

The six nurses delivered beyond her expectations.

The affair was real.

The love was real.

The exploitation was calculated.

The murder was inevitable.

And somewhere in the wreckage in Manila boarding houses and Boston studio apartments, in therapy sessions, and bottles emptied alone at 3:00 a.m., six women carried the weight of what they’d done.

They’d killed a monster.

They’d become killers.

The line between victim and perpetrator had dissolved in blood on a Persian rug worth $67,000.

That was the real horror.

Not that Nathaniel Cross was evil, but that in destroying him, he’d destroyed them, too.

Even in death, he’d won.

They were trapped forever in the worst moment of their lives.

Unable to confess, unable to heal, unable to escape.

The cycle didn’t end.

It metastasized.

Dr.Nathaniel Cross’s body was ash scattered in Boston Harbor and kept in an ern in London.

But his legacy lived on in seven women who would never be whole again.

And in hospitals across America, another charismatic surgeon was grooming another vulnerable nurse.

Another Nathaniel, another victim, another tragedy waiting to unfold.

The monster was dead.

Long live the